Jupiters Travels: Four Years Around the World on a Triumph

by Ted Simon

  There is a pretty girl with spindly legs dying of a malignant tumour, but no one can be told, certainly not the family, because their rage, says Gerry, would be uncontrollable. Also, he says, when the grief is all burned out, there is nothing left. When Turkana parents know their child is dying, they leave it to starve. There never was too much food around. They don't bury the corpses. They put them out for the hyenas, to keep the meat in circulation, as it were.

  It is hot in Lodwar, excessively hot. At times you can see the heat waving in the air.

  Outside the hospital are many more patients lying on the ground with their families, not through shortage of beds so much as because they like it there and their families come and cook for them. Hygiene? So what? The rate of recovery is high. The pain threshold is high too.

  'The men like having their feet cut off,' says Gerry.

  What? I almost shout.

  'There's a thing they get that swells their feet up. We can stop it, but the foot stays big. But they prefer to have it cut off.'

  White Medicine is Amazing, says Gerry, full of wonder and misgivings. I mean, it was never like this back in Dublin. Out here a miracle drug still does miracles. Penicillin is like it was in the days of Fleming; a shot cures just about anybody instantly, especially children. Trouble is, you ask yourself sometimes, what am I saving them for? Almost everybody in Kenya is under sixteen already. There's nothing for them to do, not much for them to eat, even in the prosperous parts of the country. To multiply the population out here, in the desert, seems crazy. Oh, my Hippocratic Oath, says Doctor Gerry, I don't know. Why don't you ask the Bishop?

  The doctor's expenses and modest wage are paid for by the Medical Missionaries of St. Mary, and there really is a bishop in Lodwar, Bishop Mahon. Does he have the answers? Not on your life.

  'I've given up thinking,' he says. T never did very much of it and now I don't bother at all. Just get on with it. Let the future take care of itself.'

  Spoken with humour, vigorous humility. He's got my number alright. If he did have the answers I wouldn't believe them.

  He is quite ready to accept that he might be creating more problems than he solves. 'What can you do? You can't let people die. Can you?' I'm not brave enough to say: Yes, it's being done all the time. We are sitting in a house the Bishop built. He knows exactly where to sit, with his back to an open lattice cement wall that he designed himself from easily moulded units. The breeze comes through to him, but fails to reach me, and I am abuzz with thirsty flies swarming fanatically into my lips and my eyes. I am uncomfortably aware that there are no flies on the Bishop.

  He's a strong, lean tough man with tobacco-coloured teeth and straight silver hair, in shorts and a tea-stained shirt. Nine years in Nigeria, six in Turkana, and an occasional whirl around the States raising money. He has small hospitals in various outlying villages, staffed by Danish volunteers as well as his own home-grown Irish pastors and sisters.

  He can't explain what motivates the Danes (it is certainly not religion) but says they are much better suited to the work, and less demanding than his own church folk. His nuns, he fears, are too often doctrinaire and officious, and their inflexibility makes it hard for them to withstand the pressures. All these naked breasts, for example, although they don't, any more, go around persuading natives to cover up. The Bishop smiles faintly at remembered scenes of outrage at the Norwegian-donated swimming pool where inflexible nuns in uptight swimsuits are exposed to the unselfconscious naturalism of supple Danes.

  The Bishop's 'action man' stance has not blinded him to his responsibilities. Having wrought the miracles of modern medicine he felt obliged to try for the fishes and the loaves as well. An FAO man reported that Lake Rudolf was capable of breeding and delivering between fifty and one hundred and fifty thousand tons of Nile perch a year, so the Bishop got that one going. Ambitious Asian businessmen smashed an aeroplane and a lorry bringing in the refrigeration. There was already an iron trawler in the lake, brought and assembled there by the British in more spacious times. They had good early catches, but then yields dropped and the scheme failed to fulfil itself. So he turned to loaves, with an irrigation scheme up-river.

  'At next rains, in April, we should get about fifty acres under cultivation. We're aiming for several hundred, but it's hard going. They aren't all industrious.

  'Without us there to direct them I don't think they could manage it on their own. I'm afraid the channels would soon choke up.'

  But that's worrying about the future, and we don't do that, do we.

  Mahon relates the ups and downs of his missionary life in the way older men describe their hopes and disappointments in their sons, with wistful fondness and faith in the goodness of their essential life and intentions, whatever the outcome. He would not willingly return to Western life (nor would any of the volunteers - its selfish, indulgent nature is too blatant viewed from here), but he has few expectations. He is resigned to criticism of his 'meddling' in non-medical matters. It seems that the technocrats of Oxfam and the specialist relief agencies have often snubbed his people, and he feels they are all vulnerable.

  'We project a terrible image on these people, going round in Land-rovers, living in concrete buildings, but if we build in mud the termites work their way up the walls and eat the door jambs and attack the roof. We've tried most things. There's a chap out there now living in a tent. He's happy enough, but I think he's doing harm because when he goes I can find nobody to replace him who would put up with those conditions.'

  He warns his people always about imposing their standards on the Turkana. 'My only hope is that after a few years we can overcome the bad effects by showing them that we care as people.'

  Truly a pious hope.

  My people are a treacherous, conceited, idle, careless, cruel, lying and begging people. Have you come to preserve us or to change us? Ha! My people are a tall, beautiful, vigorous, savage and wild people; our men can move like the lion, the antelope and the giraffe, and our women can move as your women have forgotten to move. Do you want us to care, as well?

  Still, I like the Bishop a lot, and I even prefer his nuns to the pop-eyed UN girls I saw Rovering around in Ethiopia in their solar topees and pretty safari suits.

  And I really like the horrible Turkana. As well as all the other things they are, I find them very sexy. I should know; we danced together. Homm-hommmmm I went, and stamped my feet. They were determined to make a tourist out of me. Alright, I said, I'll BE a fucking tourist, and I bargained for everything in sight. At night I went to the stamping ground down beyond the grass huts, where the fire was lit, and watched them doing their magical leaping zoo numbers. Oh boy, I said. Pictures, I gotta have pictures.

  The Chief's son and heir apparent and prospective Member of Parliament for Lodwar whispers gently to me through the hole they all have knocked in their front teeth in case of lockjaw. 'Two goats and some corn beer, and I think we could fix something,' he says.

  'Okay,' I say. 'Get the goats.' Two sleek little black goats and enough

  corn for eight gallons of overnight beer cost ninety shillings, deductible on expenses. Emmanuel, the Chief's son, is being nice to me. It's a knock-down price for a rave-up. His adjutant, the Minderbender of Lodwar, in khaki shorts and sandals, has a whole intrigue going already. Two goats, he says, will not feed a tribe, so we will choose only the best and bravest dancers, and the choicest and most nubile maidens, and we will make a secret rendezvous away over there.

  Even I know there's not a chance of keeping it quiet. This fellow just loves to plot, and everybody's very happy to join in the mischief. Next afternoon the chosen few assemble. The men gather inside one of the compounds, where they pretend to be unobserved as they bring out their best warrior headgear and their finest table linen to wrap round their waists. The girls are already on their way, twittering excitedly like all girls everywhere going to a ball, the long goatskins polished and weighted with red, white and blue beads swinging dramatically from side to side,
stretched and moulded over each tourist-tantalizing buttock, so girlish and prominent that I can't help making the incongruous comparison with bustles in a Regency ballroom. As well as their finest beads they are slung with necklaces and bracelets and ornamental aprons to indicate their wealth and marriageability, and they have fresh, glistening red mud on their partly shaven heads. The newly-fermented corn beer is in two square and shiny four-gallon cans called 'debbies', and two girls carry them on their heads with breath-taking ease and grace, making the cans dance with their bodies, investing those blunt tin cans with the elegance of the richest amphorae, leaving their arms free to trail enticingly through the air as they plunge forward, almost rushing but beautifully controlled, to the dance. While the men stalk along in a separate group wearing their ostrich feather crowns and brilliant cloaks like lords, and at this stage I don't care whether the table cloths were made in Birmingham.

  Of course the whole village knows there's something up. Little naked black spies have been buzzing round the compounds for hours. As we proceed across the dunes, a mob of the curious follow at a respectful distance. What puzzles them is the time of day. It's much too early for dancing, but I insisted on pictures by daylight. On the chosen site a big fire is started immediately, and the two innocent black beasts are ceremonially speared, gutted and tossed into the flames in one piece, hide and all.

  The girls are rehearsing, hands linked in a line, singing a chant and making little runs across the sand. The men insist on posing for endless group shots, faces set in the sternest expressions, except for Minderbender who fools about constantly in his khaki shorts, ruining the fake authenticity and making it real. Then they dance and I have to go leaping and squatting and rolling about on the ground with my 28 mm trying to remember how David Hemmings did it in Blow Up, until the light dies and it's time to carve the goats.

  By now the camp followers have caught the scent of sizzling hide and are assembled on the rising ground watching enviously, and in their front rank are several ancient geezers with expectant expressions. The tribal butchers begin cutting the animals into lumps and laying them out on a table of branches and green leaves, but there's trouble in the air, and I hear voices raised among the warriors. Not too loud, as yet, because their mouths are full of meat and gristle, but as the meat dwindles away, the altercation becomes more heated and to my surprise half the first team gets up and stalks off, looking very fierce.

  'Ah,' says Emmanuel, T am sorry but we must finish now.'

  There has been a schism in the tribe. A heresy has been exposed. According to tribal tradition the goats should be sliced up in a certain way, and the choice cuts offered to the tribal elders first (who would undoubtedly accept). Fuck that, said Minderbender and his Revolutionary Council, why should the old geezers have the best bits. They weren't even invited. But some of his followers are not so staunchly progressive. Having licked their chops, they decide it's time to suck up to the elders, and they stage a Royalist Demo and Walkout. Under their tablecloths, it is whispered, they carry extra pieces of goat for later.

  A good afternoon's work. I got my pictures; I have shown that the Turkana are indeed conceited, treacherous, and all the rest. And I have demonstrated what one tourist and a couple of goats can do to rip apart the structure of a tribal society. Tomorrow the sightseers can come on their 747s from Frankfurt and Chicago and clean up the remains.

  There is nothing left for me to do but to gather up my souvenirs and fly back to Nairobi. I wonder, would it have been like that if I had arrived on my motorcycle? No. I'm sure it wouldn't. Flying, I realize, can be very, very dangerous. I hear the purists mocking me. Motorcycles, they say, are just as alienating as aircraft, same technology sliced a different way. They don't understand. It's the effect on me I'm talking about. The long, hard solitary journey induces a different kind of respect. I mean to keep it that way from now on.

  But then, I would never have got the pictures. Oh God, I don't know, and it's no use asking the Bishop. . . .

  I wanted to get to Mombasa and drink a beer.

  I not only wanted it, I expected it. Life in Nairobi had softened me. Instead of a beer I had a flat tyre.

  'Bloody hell,' I said bitterly. 'Just the sort of thing you'd expect.'

  Petulant. Frustrated. I raised my voice. Why not? Empty highway. No one around.

  'Isn't that just bloody perfect?' I shouted.

  'Yes', said God, but I didn't hear him.

  I swore at the top of my voice and the word lost itself in the tangle of weeds at the roadside. It became time to do something useful.

  I was annoyed because I had just had two weeks in Nairobi to overhaul and repair the Triumph, to wash it and grease it and fit fine new leather bags on the tank, and new tyres and tubes on the wheels, and here I was a hundred and fifty miles down the road to Mombasa with a puncture, and a lot of dirty, uninteresting work in front of me. Furthermore it was midday and I was two degrees south of the Equator and almost down to sea level at the hottest time of the year and wearing a flying jacket.

  Hot as it was, I found the flying jacket comfortable to wear as long as the bike was moving. Its stiffness saved me from a lot of the fatigue that comes from being continually buffeted by the air, and I was spared the problem of finding somewhere to pack it. I knew it looked odd to be wearing sheepskin in the tropics and I enjoyed the effect, but when the air flow stopped, I had about thirty seconds before I reached boiling point, and my thirty seconds were up.

  I trundled the bike carefully on the wheel rim off the edge of the road, kicked out the swing stand, dismounted and threw the jacket to the ground. Then the gloves. Then the helmet. Then I started on the baggage.

  Not even a mad dog would do this in the midday sun, I thought.

  In Nairobi they had warned me. It's a good tar road to Mombasa, they said, four or five hours in a car, but the road surface gets so hot that it causes punctures. In Nairobi I had let someone else fit the new tubes and he had pinched the rear one with the tyre levers, making so many holes that I put the older patched one back instead. Now the heat had melted off the patches. That is what I thought had happened, and it gave me a good chance to put the blame on someone else.

  'Bloody fool,' I said. But the bloody fool was me, for being too lazy to do it myself, and for not starting earlier in the morning when the road was cooler.

  Normally a puncture was not a disaster. With practice and an hour's energetic work it would be done. First I had to take all the heavy stuff off the bike, because with the rear tyre flat it was impossible for me to lift it on to the centre stand. And on a soft surface I had to find something firm to lay under the centre stand as well. I got out the tools, and soap, and a cupful of water and a rag. Then the right exhaust muffler had to be dropped, which means unscrewing a couple of small nuts with their washers and laying them carefully on the outspread rag. With this done the spindle could be unscrewed and withdrawn from the axle, and the spacer and wheel adjuster with it, and all put on the rag away from grit and concealing clumps of grass. I tried to think like a manual.

  Then I had a good trick I had discovered. With the swing stand out as well, the bike would lean over to the left at a crazy angle and there was room to take the wheel off the splines and slip it out from under the mudguard. Without this trick, or something similar, it was impossible for one man to remove the rear wheel. It was called a Quickly Detachable wheel, and it was certainly easier than taking off the sprocket and chain also, but it had not, I thought, been brought to a pitch of great refinement.

  With the wheel off, having remembered at the last minute to detach the speedometer cable, there were the security bolts to loosen. These were two bolts which clamped the tyre to the rim and caused many spectators to wonder why I had three air valves on my wheel instead of the usual one. The nuts could be hard to undo because of the filth that gathered on them, but I had two pieces of plastic tube over the bolts packed with

  grease so that, once loosened, the nuts could be quickly spun o
ff with the finger. That saved about ten minutes each way.

  New tyres were harder to get off, especially with the rather small levers I was obliged to carry, but the soapy water helped a lot. Unfortunately when I pulled out the tube, the rim belt which came with it, snapped. The rim belt protects the tube from the inside of the rim where all the spokes come through, and it is obviously safer to have one. I had no spare, another reason for cursing.

  There was nothing wrong with the old patches after all. There were two new punctures on the inside of the tube, tiny slits, and near them I noticed score lines and places where the rubber had blistered.

  'Shit and damnation’ I said, and 'Merde puissance treize.' I swore a lot in those days, in a rather dull way but with feeling.

  Clearly the old tube was no good any more, and I would have to repair the punctured new one. It was difficult in that heat, with the flies refreshing themselves on my sweat, to be thorough, particularly with the clumsy patches I was carrying at the time.

  The best trick in my repertoire was provided by a company called Schrader in Birmingham. They made a valve with a long tube which I could screw into the engine instead of a spark plug. As long as you had at least two cylinders, you could run the engine on one and the other piston would pump up your tyre. So I was able to pump up the tube, and it seemed alright.

  I put the puncture routine into reverse. The tyre rims slid snugly into place on the soap, and the wheel pumped up hard. Twenty minutes later I had everything back on the bike and was washing my hands in the last of the soapy water when I saw the tyre was half flat.

  The life drained out of me then. I could not even find the energy to swear. I dropped down on the jacket and pulled out my cigarettes, and tried to think about other things. It was very pleasant here, I thought, if you had nothing to do. Hotter than Nairobi, certainly. But not too hot. Not at all. And pleasantly dry.